How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting
Post 22: When God Says “Wait”
Our Path Marked Healing: Waiting, Wailing, Weaving, and Worshipping
The second half of our path is marked “healing.” Healing is a term that describes the second phase in historic soul care. Today, we use terms like encouraging, enlightening, helping people to see the larger story of God’s perspective, infusing hope, etc.
I like to picture healing with the powerful image of celebrating the resurrection. We are moving from grieving to hope like the Apostle Paul was in 2 Corinthians 1:9-10.
“Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us.”
From Here to Eternity
Once we’ve climbed in the casket, we then celebrate the resurrection by finding hope in God’s higher plan and loving purposes. It is possible to hope in the midst of grief.
Sustaining says, “Life is bad.” Healing says, “God is good.” In sustaining, we enter the smaller earthly story of hurt. In healing, we enter the larger, heavenly story of hope.
Healing celebrates the resurrection by exploring waiting, wailing, weaving, and worshipping. These four biblical stages contrast with and expand upon the one stage in the world’s process called “acceptance.”
Stage Five: Waiting—Trusting with Faith Rather Than Regrouping with Self-Sufficiency
You’re in a casket. Finally, you’ve come face-to-face with death and with utter human hopelessness. Do you want to stay there? No! Frantic to escape? Yes! You cry out to God for help. What’s he say? “Wait.”
Now you’re at a faith-point. “I trust Him; I trust Him not. I’ll wait; I’ll not wait.”
Which will it be? Will you wait or regroup? Will you wait on God or will you self-sufficiently depend upon yourself?
Regrouping Described: The Woman at the Well
John 4 illustrates the contrast between waiting and regrouping. The woman at the well was in a husband-casket. One husband left the scene, “Encore! Encore!” she’d shout, bringing the curtain down on another failed marriage. Frantically she searched time after time for a man she could have—a man she could desperately clutch who would meet her desperate needs by desperately desiring her above all else.
We don’t know what came next for her after she surrendered her thirsts to Christ. Certainly, if she were to live out her new Christ-life, she would have to change her habitual pattern of regrouping through “having” a man.
Suppose that she took her longing to God in prayer. Presuppose God told her to stop living with this man who was not her husband. Don’t you think that on a human plane she would experience excruciating emptiness, starving hunger?
So she prays to God, “Father, I know that all I need is You and what You choose to provide. I’m cleaning up my life. Would You please send me a godly man.”
God says, “Wait. Delay your gratification. Don’t get involved with a man.”
Everything inside her—her flesh-habituated past way of surviving, her cistern-digging style of relating—craves satisfaction now. If she regroups, she grasps yet another husband on the rebound. She takes matters into her own hands.
And What Would Hope Look Like?
What would hope look like in her context? In ours? In yours?
You know what’s coming. Now is when I say…
“Come back tomorrow to define and find hope.”
